5 Female Driven Movies

I love movies. And so do most women who purchased 55% of movie tickets in 2009. But even though last year women comprised majority of the moviegoers, Hollywood has been slow on the uptake, continuing to produce movies that do not pass the Bechdel Test. If you do not know what the Bechdel test is, watch the short video below and prepare to have your mind blown (captions provided for the hearing impaired).

For more statistics on women’s presence in literature and film check out my IWD post.

So what’s socially aware feminist to do? Fear not, I’ve put together in no way exhaustive list of movies you can enjoy without betraying your feminist identity. Save the guilt for the pop corn (actually fuck guilt altogether, cut it out of your emotional diet).

1. The Waitress

Jenna is a waitress stuck in an abusive marriage with no escape. Her husband controls her life: he takes all the money she makes, drops her off and picks her up from work, so he knows exactly where she is at any time. Baking pies is her main coping mechanism. But when she gets pregnant, Jenna decides her unborn child deserves a better life than this and begins planning an escape plan.

Though it may sound depressing, the story is actually very uplifting and the film finds a very playful tone. The film manages to stay realistic without being bleak. Jenna is a delightful character, a strong woman. And did I mention Nathan Fillion plays the role of a delightfully awkward gynecologist? (Is there anything nerd girls love more than awkward Nathan Fillion? If there is, I haven’t found it.)

2. An Education

An Education is a story of 1960’s English school girl who starts an affair with an older man. It is a coming of age story in which Jenny struggles to find her place in the world, confronts gender roles and the hypocrisy of adults, and learns the value of education.

When Jenny meets David, a charming businessman, she is confronted with a choice. She can choose the life of domesticity, marry a rich man, quit her expensive private school and abandon dreams of going to Oxford. Once Jenny realizes that those who preached about the immense value of education are so quick to change their minds in favor of marriage, Jenny starts questioning everything she’s been told before.

3. Lore

The film takes place in post World War II occupied Germany. Lore’s parents are Nazis and they are taken to jail, and she is left alone to take care of her siblings. As she makes the journey through the occupied Germany to her grandmother’s house in Hamburg, she is forced to face the reality of fascist atrocities.

Lore is beautifully filmed and acted. Some scenes knock the breath right out of you. It also features a somewhat unexplored period in history, and it is really interesting to see those first post-war moments through the eyes of a child who was fed all the Nazi propaganda.

4. Winter’s Bone

Before Jennifer Lawrence entered the world of Hollywood block busters, she starred in this Sundance Film Festival award winning movie. Winter’s Bone is another coming of age story that explores extreme poverty in the rural United States.

Jennifer Lawrence’s character Ree embarks on a quest to find her drug-dealing father in order to save her family from losing the house they live in. Ree demonstrates great courage and tenacity. The acting is great and the scenes evocative.

5. The Heat

The Heat is this summer’s buddy cop comedy that stars Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy in which an “uptight FBI Special Agent is paired with a foul-mouthed Boston cop to take down a ruthless drug lord” (IMDB).

The Heat is hilarious and passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. There is not even a love interest, can you believe it? Melissa McCarthy’s character is funny but never because of her weight. The movie address sexism in a funny, but not at all preachy way, and *spoiler alert* the bad guy gets shot in the balls!

Though some people find the war on drugs and the violation of civil rights depicted in The Heat disturbing, it is worth seeing if you’re looking for light-hearted entertainment that isn’t 100% testosterone-dominated.

Caveats

As I was making this list, I noticed that all of the characters in these movies are cis straight white women. I’ve only listed movies that I have seen. It’s obvious to me that I need to branch out of my comfort zone and watch some movies that feature POCs, LGBQT characters, and people with disabilities. In the comment section please recommend some movies I can start with and I promise that the next list I write will be more inclusive.

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37 thoughts on “5 Female Driven Movies”

1. Saving Face- Lesbian Chinese-American characters are adorably adorable.
2. Itty Bitty Titty Committee- Adorable multi-racial queer girls do anarchy stuff (and there are even BUTCHES OMG).
3. Our Song- Depressing but good movie about a trio of girl friends growing up in the Bronx. Features POC.
4. Pariah- Movie about a young queer WOC coming to terms w/her identity.
5. Matilda- Sweet, funny movie where a little girl changes her situation thru her smarts and some magic.
6. Now and Then- A bunch of young girls are friends with each other all over a summer. Very cute.

I liked 2010’s Leading Ladies. It’s kind of like Gypsy (also a fantastic film–1962 with Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood), but it also examines gender bias in the world of competitive ballroom dancing.

A tomboy befriends a young religious woman in the South (Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker) and they become inseparable friends. The story of their friendship is being told by an elderly Jessica Tandy to a stressed-out Kathy Bates.

The movie has a lot of lesbian undertones, and that isn’t an accident – in the book the girls become lovers and make a home together. In the movie, this is sort of implied, though they’re never shown as lesbians outright. It’s an amazing movie.

YES. I own this movie on DVD, and will lend it to/watch it with anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. It is so wonderful. It’s about two women who live in the south… it’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s fantastic. Towanda!

Memoirs of a Geisha–a young girl in early twentieth-century Japan is brought up to become a highly desired geisha, but must fight for control of her own destiny. Features an entirely nonwhite, mostly female, main cast.
The Help–Two no-nonsense maids and an idealistic college graduate work quietly for racial equality in 1960s Mississippi by writing a book of the memoirs of Jackson’s black maids. Mixed black and white ensemble cast, mostly female.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day–a desperate matronly woman in Depression-era England takes a job as a social secretary to a flighty but good-hearted singer. Entirely white cast but female driven.

Memoirs of a Geisha is a very visually beautiful movie, but I’m not sure I’d call it feminist. Love interest is the biggest plot point, and she is forever dependent on men. Haven’t seen The Help. I loved Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.

I really enjoyed Memoirs but I haven’t watched it in a long time and definitely not through the lens of feminism. I’m wondering (rhetorically) if it’s racially problematic/feminist-lacking because it’s a WWII period film or because the book author, director, and screenplay writer were all white man, white man, white woman.

Book written by a white man. One of the first classes I took at Smith was on American-held stereotypes of the Japanese and we spent quite a bit of time on this book. The movie hadn’t come out yet, but the same things hold true.

YES, Asian exotification specifically is suuuuuuper problematic! It’s something I’ve been actively trying to work on for a long time now because I’ve definitely been super guilty of it and it makes me feel sick at myself now.

To anyone who’s seen or read Memoirs of a Geisha, I *highly* recommend reading “Geisha, a Life” (“Geisha of Gion” in the UK) which is the autobiography that the geisha Arthur Golden interviewed for his book eventually wrote. Her story is extremely feminist as I recall: she chooses her profession as a little kid because she falls in love with dancing, she’s never forced to have sex with anyone in her work let alone be ritually deflowered (unlike the characters in his novel), and she retires before 30 as the most popular and wealthy geisha in Japan after successfully starting her own business and trying to influence her culture to be more feminist. It’s interesting in its own right even if you aren’t interested in Golden’s imagined world. My fantastic library had copies of both books out next to each other years back–probably when the movie came out.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_a_Geisha#Lawsuithttp://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/qa/documents/02473409.htm

My worry with most such discussions, is that I no more expect white men or white women to write stories about minorities, than I expect men in general to write about women, or straight women to write about anyone not straight women. GIRLS on HBO got a lot of flack for lacking main characters that were minorities (of course a lot of the time when we do see mixed race/orientation tv shows, we get stereotypes). Is it easy for non-white male individuals to get into top tier film making positions? No, but at the same time, I really can’t see a major change occurring in the demographics across film until those involved in writing, directing, and producing, reflect those unrepresented groups.

I scratch my head to come up with female protagonist films in general, and even when thinking of films with well developed black male characters (that aren’t exaggerations like Shaft of Black Dynamite) the list is less than a half dozen. In a hunt for LGBT films, one of the few lists an initial search finds is this

Of course this list alone… is a bit… confusing is one of many words I’d use. Partially it seems focused on films that two main male characters that are straight have a close relationship, or contains some homo eroticism directed at straight male masculinity. The only realm that seems to openly engage with LGBT at all might be Yaoi manga, which strangely is mostly devoured by straight cis women (or should I say girls based on the age range?).

Can we solve both problems at once? That is the problem of representation for the entire diverse population that exists, or showing strong female main characters that pass Bechdel test?

I think men can and do write strong, complex female characters. Most of the books I read are authored by men (fantasy and sci/fy usually are), and some of them feature great female characters. I think it’s a matter of intellectual laziness and disinclination to examine biases and long-held beliefs.

But I do agree with you in that we need more diversity in content creators, so the stories they tell can be more authentic.

Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken. I believe it would pass the Bechdel test. Takes place during (or just after) the Great Depression. It’s about an orphan who runs away to join the circus. Features a disabled character and is based on a true story. I can’t go into much more detail without giving a lot away but I love, love, LOVE that movie and have for a long time.

This was a great post – thank you so much! The Waitress and An Education are two of my favorites! A lesser known movie that I really enjoyed was “Coming Soon” (1999) with Bonnie Root, Gaby Hoffman, and Ryan Reynolds. It is about teenage girls in NYC who go on a quest for an orgasm. It’s a little campy, and doesn’t have any racial or socio-economic diversity, but I think the message of focusing on female pleasure is so compelling (and missing from most mainstream portrayals of sex and teenage sex, in particular). There is a small lesbian sub-plot, as well. The film was so controversial when it came out in 1999, around the same time as “American Pie,” that it was given an NC-17 rating by the MPAA (though there is no nudity, no violence, and barely any profanity) for the sheer reason that it focused on girls’ sexual agency. Because of the rating, it didn’t get picked up by any distributors and so never got a real theatrical release. More details on the controversy in this article: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/99/08/26/ORGASM.html.